ABSTRACT
Though church music in the ordinary sense can hardly be classed as folk or traditional music, there is a species of unaccompanied unison psalm singing among the Gaelic-speaking congregations of the West Highlands of Scotland which is of interest to the student of Scottish folk tradition because it is in fact a folk embellishment of the Scottish psalm tunes originally introduced at the Reformation. The psalms were not printed in metre in Gaelic until 1659—a hundred years later. The Highlanders had no means of acquiring the tunes of the psalms but that of oral transmission; in the course of which all the processes of ornamentation and variation which invariably goes with the oral transmission of tunes, began to operate. Though the full flowering of the Scottish Highland genius for musical decoration may have gone from the singing of the psalms with the passing of the Long Tunes however, the process which evolved them is still very much alive.
